With a pinch of practicum here and a dash of career counseling classes there — blended with business acumen for turning profits on pierogies — it would seem that College of Education graduate student Ashley Hamilton has found a recipe for the good life.

The College of Education's Linsey Covert, in collaboration with faculty members and the TechCelerator, is developing her program of community building to address bullying and other conflicts in schools.

Penn State College of Education professors JoLynn Carney, associate professor of counselor education, and Richard Hazler, professor of counselor education, studied the effects of bullying on bystanders. "Bullying can also cause people who witness it to demonstrate physical stress symptoms of increased heart rate and perspiration as well as high levels of self-reported trauma even years after bullying events," Carney said. According to Carney and Hazler, the general theme emerging from their research is that bullying doesn't just affect victims.

Two counseling professors from Penn State supported families who experienced the June 2011 Minot, N.D. flood disaster.

Licensed professional clinical counselors -- JoLynn Carney, an associate professor of counselor education at Penn State, and Richard Hazler, the professor-in-charge of counselor education at Penn State, both in the College of Education -- were called upon by the American Red Cross to help provide crisis counseling to some of the 10,000-plus displaced victims of the flood that ravaged the town of Minot, N.D. in June 2011.

Elementary school counselors can play a large part in closing the achievement gap that exists among students, says a team of Penn State researchers. In a new journal article, Jerry Trusty, Elizabeth Mellin, and James Herbert, faculty members in Penn State's Counselor Education program, recommend that counselors organize partnerships to bring together the schools, the students' families, and the communities. When elementary school counselors forge successful school-family-community partnerships, they are taking steps to improving the learning and social outcomes that result in closing achievement and opportunity gaps, say the authors.

Once characterized as a normal, character-building rite of passage for school children, school bullying is under renewed scrutiny by today's researchers and educators. In the seven years since the tragedy at Columbine High School, there have been more than twenty school shootings in the United States that resulted in death or serious injury. Does school bullying play a role in these tragedies?